Chapter Four
Overcoming the Problem of the Modern Subject: Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and Virginia Woolf's The Waves
In the last three chapters, we have seen how Conrad and Woolf view the formation of the modern subject and the illusions that are frequently part of its ideological makeup. This final chapter will be devoted to the two different ways in which Conrad and Woolf attempt to resolve the problem outlined above. In this chapter I will be using two concepts developed in the writings of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). His concept of the choronotope will be used in our reading of Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo (1904) and his concept of polyphony will be used to shed light on Woolf's novel The Waves (1931). These two theories will help us to understand how Conrad and Woolf found different methods to explore the relationship between self and society.
Bakhtin introduces the term chronotope in his essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1938; revised 1973) in order to illustrate the connection of the temporal and spatial relationships in works of literature. In his view the literary text contains a number of unique features. Specifically, Bakhtin felt that the novel represents an "orchestration" of many voices, a heteroglossic multi-voicedness not limited to the speeches of the characters that the author has transcribed, but may also include those voices in the indirect or implicit dialogues within the text. Bakhtin's conception of "dialogue" may imply a range larger than that of two parties only; any number of participants may be involved in a Bakhtinian dialogue. In Bakhtin's view, the narrator does not assume the status of an editor who represents dialogue in paraphrases but instead the narrator, as an objective expert, reproduces the image of the characters in language as faithfully as possible. As a result Bakhtin says that the narrator's voice is essentially "double-voiced and double-languaged."
To substantiate his claim, he offers a historical overview of the chronotopes that signify various stages in the history of literature, ranging from early genres such as Greek romances to the folkloric mode of Rabelais. While his primary examples are taken from late Classical and Renaissance literature, he also employs many examples from modern novelists. Although Bakhtin does not mention Conrad, Gene Moore believes that Conrad's novels can be used to demonstrate Bakhtin's concepts. Understanding Bakhtin's view of meaning to be fundamentally dialogic, not individual or monologic, Moore's reading of Nostromo sees the double authority of the voices of Nostromo and Decoud, not to mention the multiple authority coming from the other voices in the text, as a prime example of the dialogic condition of speech. The island of the Great Isabel is remote from Costaguana not only geographically but also temporally, or rather temporo-spatially, or chronotopically, as it is created through the compression of narrational time and space.
Most literary critics agree that an important feature of Nostromo is its concern with history. In fact, Eloise Knapp Hay feels that the historical process can be seen as the main character in Nostromo. Bruce Hendrickson qualifies Hay's statement, saying that this history is essentially characterological, for it is composed of many individual "micronarratives." Conrad's perception of the historical process as something composed from many personal stories makes Nostromo different from Conrad's other works such as Lord. The perspective Nostromo obtains is due to the presence of both epic elements, such as an omniscient narrator and a diverse body of characters, and modern elements, include his geo-political themes and unconventional time-sequence. These qualities allow Conrad to present Sulaco, a fictional city whose narrative represents the "problematics of history and genealogy." Another critic, Benita Parry, sees Nostromo as an inquiry into the significance of history that at once grants a central role to the historical perspective and, at the same time, regards that centrality with scorn. Parry offers the fact that Conrad shifts the weight of his story from grand narratives of genealogy to telling stories about specific characters as evidence that he both legitimizes and de-legitimizes the role of history in this text. Regardless of which critical opinion is deemed correct, it is clear that this novels affects the status of the modern subject by working in conjunction with history.
In the opening of the novel, Conrad writes that "In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterward, the town of Sulaco...had never been anything commercially more important than a coasting port." With these words he has already begun to create the social and genealogical past that will enable him to dramatize the problematic aspects of the city's political future. Further instances of how Conrad contextualizes the history of the land occur when he remarks on how the environment of the city bears few traces of the Spaniards who ruled much of South America. This is because the Spanish armada, needing a strong win to move ahead, found Sulaco was protected by "the prevailing calm of a vast gulf." Consequently Sulaco became known to sailors as a protected city, safe from the Spanish conquerors because of it inaccessible location. As a results, Conrad writes, the town remained cloistered as an "inviolable sanctuary," a hidden world amid the subdued tempo of the Golfo Placido. Using language to invoke a sense of the monolithic landscape surrounding Sulaco, Conrad writes that the city was laid out upon the land as if "within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with mourning draperies of cloud." This passage gives the reader an expansive sense of space, for in this territory the individual finds himself dwarfed by the surroundings; indeed, Conrad's description of the environment contains elements that could equally describe the formal features of a Greek amphitheater. Moreover, Conrad's description connoted the feelings of a religious presence invested deep within this land that is constructed like a primitive temple.
In further descriptions of the cartography of Sulaco, Conrad invests the land with a history that includes genealogies of both a social and spiritual nature. As legend has it, when two fortune-seeking sailors from America came to Sulaco to steal the gold contained in its mines, their souls were condemned to wander the earth forever. According to the fable the American treasure-hunters are still there, their ghostly presences guarding the caves of fabulous wealth. Having faded into mythology, such stories have become part of the mythological consciousness of the Sulaco natives, a consciousness that is directly connected to a landscape that stands against a divided sky, "a bright patch of blue haze" on one side, and "the bright skirt of the horizon" on the other. Divided in this way, the sky resembles the bountiful Christian world that stands in opposition to the pagan world of heretics and thieves. Sulaco is a land that is distinctly set apart from Europe, shorn off by a boundary line that, while imperceptible, is nonetheless definitive. Upon crossing this boundary, European ships that set course for Sulaco find that, suddenly and without warning, they lack the windpower needed to complete their journey. Hence, Sulaco enjoyed the privilege of being a privatized world, untainted by the imperialistic ideology that infected the nations of Europe. The great importance attributed to the landscape of Sulaco is stressed throughout the novel, and will be emphasize for the last time in the novel's concluding sentence, when Dr. Monygham contemplates Nostromo's "passionate" triumph in this world where "bright white clouds shine like a mass of solid silver." Although Hendrickson finds this line to be a curious paradox, I find this image of an "insubstantial permanence" to be a quite appropriate one to use when describing Nostromo, a man who is composed of qualities that are, in many respects, paradoxical and contradictory.
It is at this point that Hendrickson introduces Bakhtin's concept of the chornotope. Conrad's continual emphasis on environmental features resembles Bakhtin's conception of the ancient epic and drama. Bakhtin discovers that, in ancient epic drama, the author dealt with concepts of time and space by thinki8ng of the world in a profoundly anthropological manner. To a citizen of ancient Greece, says Bakhtin, the natural world was deeply invested with a sense of mythological space linked with mythological time, and this combination was used to redefine the world of ancient Greece into an elaborate tableau of anthropomorphic illusion and spectacle. Stages as a tableau of temporal motifs, the world of ancient Greece was seen as a narrative tableau whose mannerisms, gestures and expressions were in imitation of a great work of art. Finding expression most clearly in productions of artistic literature, Bakhtin's use of the term chronotope stands for that perspective in which time is linked with space. Literary chronotopes, he declares, may be used to illuminate both spatial and temporal dimensions into a unified perspective in such a way that time becomes a material presence subject to spatial alterations, while space becomes a temporal entity subject to the passage of time. For Bakhtin, the critical task of evaluating the artistic nature of the chronotope is found by judging the degree to which these two main indicators, time and space, traverse and penetrate one another.
The fact that time has stopped for the city of Sulaco may be evidenced by looking at several passages. When a wealthy English banker visits the town he exclaims, "Has anything happened here for a hundred years before?" In addition, the legend of the two gold prospectors who have been condemned to haunt the Sulaco mines for eternity contributes to this image of Sulaco as a place where time has been suspended. As Hendrickson points out, Conrad makes a striking use of the time-space chronotope when, in the later half of the novel, Nostromo and the journalist Martin Decoud are stranded on the island of the Great Isabel. This is an example of events in real time being overtaken and supplanted by an event that happens only in mythic time. With this real event reflecting on the legendary fable of the two lost prospectors, it is almost as if the two actions, one mythic and one material, have become intertwines with one another. The fact that these stories about two pairs of individuals have been subsumed within the mythical consciousness of the people can be ascertained when Barrios says that, like the mythical sailors, Decoud and the gold have been lost forever.
Having been left alone by Nostromo for a succession of days, Decoud "had died in want of faith of himself and others." After spending one full day on the island of the Great Isabel, Decoud lies down in the tall grass and gazes wearily at the sea that surrounds him. He wonders aloud how he has not seen a single bird or beast for the entire day. Upon speaking to himself, Decoud realizes the utter desolation of his surroundings, for the only sound he has heard all day has been the sound of his own voice. Without sound, without sleep, without food, without human contact, Decoud remains in a supine position, "either on his back or on his face." The following insight gives the reader a clear insight into Decoud's state of mind, revealing the degree to which isolation has overtaken him: "Solitude of mere outward conditions of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and skepticism have no place." Decoud's experience of a complete and barren solitude is the curse known to all but a few, the sickness that only the simplest are able to survive. Under such conditions, Conrad writes, the mind may grow wild and irrational, no longer held in check by the civilized world, and for the reason Decoud finds his thoughts "driven into the exile of utter disbelief." In this state of complete solitude, perspectives of social criticism such as irony and skepticism truly have no place.
After three days of waiting for Nostromo to return, Decoud begins to find reasons to doubt his own existence as a thinking, willing human being. He feels his consciousness slipping into "the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and the forces of nature." After five days of waiting, Decoud finds these feelings of being divorced from himself to be overpowering, and he chooses to wallow in his depression and abandons his thoughts for the people of Costaguana, a political struggle that now seems far removed and inconsequential. After ten days have passed, Martin Decoud's encounter with the chronotope takes place, as the solitary passage of time transforms itself into a palpable material presence. It is at this point that Decoud becomes transfixed by an image that will determine the course of his life. No longer believing in the reality of the material world, Decoud loses faith in himself and forgets his own existence as a human being. Stripped of his formative past and lacking hope for a productive future, Decoud becomes aware of an image that represents the spatial and temporal aspects of his confinement. Decoud's growing fascination with what he sees as a "thin cord" is an example of Conrad's use of the chronotope in this novel, for this cord represents his life both spatially and temporally. The cord represents the spatial environment of the Great Isabel, which is dominated by a vast silence: "The solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without any sort of emotions whatever." In addition, the cord stands for the temporal dimension of Decoud's confinement as he spends his days watching the silence that hung "like a still cord stretched to breaking-point." Viewing his life as increasingly futile and purposeless, at this point Decoud retrieves the pistol that Nostromo had left for him. When the brilliant thinker Martin Decoud commits suicide by shooting himself, he no longer believes in anything, and Conrad memorialized him as "a victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity."
This scene is particularly noteworthy because here Conrad indicated the Decoud's consciousness undergoes a fundamental change when he finds himself increasingly alienated from society. The precise nature of this change can be found using Kenneth Burke's section on alienation in his "Dictionary of Pivotal Terms." In the first section of this essay he attempts to explain the philosophic basis behind this term that has become a ubiquitous feature of the modern period. The term, originally used by the philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Diderot, was later employed by Hegel before it became a dominant feature of Marxist terminology. This term derives from the feeling of disconnection that surfaces when a person feels utterly bewildered by a world that seems essentially foreign to the rational mind. According to Burke, there are two forms of alienation, material and spiritual. Material alienation arises when a person is unable to obtain those things that most members of society consider the basic standards of living. Spiritual alienation occurs when, having suffered from this 'abnormal' state for a length of time, a person begins to consider alternatives that, in a rational state of mind, one would reject.
While the world seems unconcerned with human consciousness, the alienated human being longs to experience a sense of connection. The individual's need to "repossess the world" is often met by his becoming affiliated with ideologies that offer new modes of thinking about the purpose of one's life. Although Decoud's alienation stems from his loneliness and the utter desolation of his surroundings, Burke says that alienation can occur anywhere, even among people who receive substantial material benefits from the society they inhabit. Burke cites the nobles of the French Enlightenment as an example of this class who were "materially rewarded but spiritually alienated." It was this class of people who encouraged the French Revolution of 1778 by becoming friendly with the Encyclopedists and, Burke predicts, the materially rewarded but spiritually alienated citizens of modern America may be the ones who are most attracted to the Marxist critique of capitalism. It is this same section of society, Burke says, that may eventually incite a second American revolution guided by a principles of Marxism.
Naturally, with the loss of faith in rationality, the alienated individual also experiences an erosion of faith in religious principles and, to offset this loss in ideological perspective, Burke observes that a "compensatory increase in sensuality" emerges out of the alienated social body. However, there is a supplement for such alienation from religious principles. Through the "immediacy of the senses" alienated individuals attempt to reclaim a world they can no longer relate to, a world that has grown alien. While at first glance it may seem that Conrad's record of Decoud's progressive alienation bears no traces of "compensatory" sensuality, nevertheless Decoud's placement in a non-sensual world devoid of human features poses an equally destructive environment for this intellectual who believes himself to be a member of the proletariat. Finding himself isolated from all humanity, Decoud discovers that he has become radically disconnected from the social environment he was once part of. That he has been alienated from those grand narratives of religious ideology that provide the individual with stability and order may be ascertained from statements such as "He beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images" and "He believed in nothing." Unlike the Greeks, who were able to observe the human world wrapped in a spatial-temporal narrative tableau, Decoud's alienation springs from his inability to locate his image in the natural world. Unable to project his image onto an alien world, in time Decoud becomes completely alienated, his identity being submerged beneath a simulacrum of a self that is no longer an active participant in the world.
In his essay "Order," Burke writes about the work of Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher who established the rationalist ground for solipsism, the belief that there are no external objects in the world except the self. Burke notes that, when looking back at the history of philosophy, we realize that Bentham's concept of "fictitious entities" stands for a conceptual idea and not a material thing, that is, it stands for sign and not signifiers. For this reason Bentham's solipsism is more of a critical attitude towards the world, and not a rationally-orderered philosophy of perception. However, due to his sense of alienation from the world, Decoud falls into a solipsistic view of the universe; he believes that Nostromo has been killed, and that all of the people he loves in Sulaco have disappeared. It is at this point that Decoud becomes fixated once again by the image of the cord, a manifestation of the spatial-temporal chonotope mentioned above. Composed of both space and time, Decoud longs to hear the cord as it snaps. Even though it would mean that his life would end, by hearing the cord of life as it splits apart, Decoud would receive confirmation of his fading belief in the existence of external objects. Realizing that the sound of the cord would not be heard while he is still on the island, Decoud wades into the water, filling his pockets with gold ingots he had collected with Nostromo. Ironically, Decoud sinks into the water without a sound, surrounded by the eternal silence of the placid gulf. In this story Conrad reveals how deeply the individual consciousness can be affected by exposure to an impersonal environment abstracted from the physical world, as it has in the case of Decoud's fatal alienation.
By adapting the myth of a treasure linked to the supernatural to the conditions of a frontier country in a period of colonial imperialism, Conrad interweaves the emblems of folkloric history with those of modern politics. According to the mythos of folklore, a treasure is always a powerful objects that confers great benefits on those who, through physical and moral fortitude and profound spiritual awareness, pass the test of character and are able to use it properly. Developing the folkloric chonotope contained in the myth of the two gringos, Conrad produces a chonotope that not only pervades the sweeping use of time within the space of the novel, but portends future incidents as well. In Dorothy Van Ghent's view, the focal point of Nostromo is the guardianship of a treasure, a subjects commonly used in folkloric literature. Nostromo's name, meaning "our man," emblematizes his stature as a natural manas the Man of the People, and his lack of a cultivated conscience symbolizes his unwavering honesty and fierce loyalty. Folkloric elements pervade the novel, including Conrad's portrayal of Gould, who is constructed in "archetypal language that signifies the exotic foreignness of his moral purity." Conrad's use of language in Nostromo fails to exhibit the richness one might expect from the author of Darkness. In Nostromo, when a female character is described as "A picturesque woman in a pose of maternal exaltation, Conrad employs a generalized phrasing that renders a figure already outlined in the image-repetoire of modern readers. But it is a functional phrasing nonetheless, for it communicates the image that is needed, "an impersonal, classical kind of image." Through Conrad's depiction of this classical set of characters, Van Ghent says, "a classical typology is achieved that deepens and strengthens the comprehensive human perspective in which events in Costaguana are placed." These elements are taken by Sooyoung Chon as evidence that Conrad, in creating a text that on the surface fails to articulate a modernist notion of truth, has reached his last phase of artistic development. Even though Conrad produced several more novels after Nostromo, Chon believes that this novels represents the apex of Conrad's artistic life in that is is "more akin to contemporary sensibilities." I myself do not feel that Chon's statement is plausible for I do not feel that Conrad's work should be equated with the work of the postmodern artist who, according to Frederic Jameson, sees surface meaning as "the supreme formal feature" of his work. That this was not Conrad's intention can be proven through a letter he wrote to John Galsworthy in 1898, where he expounded his belief that "the force in a book is in the fidelity to the surface of life, to the surface of events--to the surface of things and ideas. Now this is not being shallow." Unlike the postmodern artist, Conrad's surfaces are not depthless but are, on the contrary, full of meaning.
The island of the Great Isabel, a space where time is of vital importance, is also the place where Decoud experiences a profound sense of the dissolution of time. That Decoud is unable to chart the course of time's passage is underscored by the narrator, who continually mentions this fact, adding day after day to his captivity. A concatenation of days falls upon Decoud who, in reaction to his isolation from the world, dissolves while the narrator enumerated the days and nights which pass over him, from the end of the first day to each succeeding day. The days pass by one after another, differing little until, after ten days have passed, the narrator stops referring to the calendar passage of time. Perhaps this is because Decoud himself is unaware of how much time has elapsed. On his final day, the narrator remarks that Decouds observes the passage of time by gauging the sun's distance from the horizon line; it is at this point that Decoud's disjunction from the standard measure of him has brought about the blurring of his subjective sense of time. Decoud is oppressed by the weight of numberless days spent in perpetual isolation. He takes his own life by submerging himself in the water, his pockets weighted with the valuable gold ingots he and Nostromo were in search of. This incident is not related directly; rather, the suicide is recounted within the story of Nostromo's return to the Great Isabel. The critic Edward Said names this feature an example of Conrad's use of "delayed decoding," a term first used by another critic, Ian Watt. Conrad employs this technique, he says, "to dramatize the problematic relation between the past and the present." Conrad's reader is forced to re-read and try to work out the events presented by the narrator. According to Said, Conrad's use of the retrospective mode in this instance is insignificant, since Nostromo's wealth stems directly from his desertion of Decoud on the Great Isabel. Reputedly famous for his incorruptibility, Nostromo becomes a traitor who may be blamed for Decoud's death and he recognized that his actions must remain undisclosed. Paradoxically, Hendrickson says, Nostromo remains 'our man' of the republic in that he signifies how the development of a society is contingent on "violence, forgetfulness and repression."
Hendrickson sees Nostromo's return from the Great Isabel and his rebirth after fourteen hours of sleep to be a transition point from one temporal orientation to another. Up to this point Nostromo has been, like Tuan Jim, a mythic or folkloric hero in the eyes of others and in his own eyes. Hendrickson feels that underneath Nostromo's mythic quality is the fact that he seems to be immune from aging; perhaps Nostromo lives what Bakhtin calls "the adventure time of the hero." This time is exemplified in the adventure time of Greek romance, a chonotope whose significance lies in its being the most abstruse and, simultaneously, the most unchanging of all chronotopes. Under this chronotope the world and the individual are both entirely resistant to change. The individual lives without the possibility of personal development or transforming as a character. Regardless of the changes brought about by the narrative, no matter how far-reaching they appear to be, this character's world remains perpetually the same, exempt from the forces of revision and recreation that affect everybody by the adventure-time hero. Instead of any characterological evolution, which the modern reader has come to expect, the adventure-time reader encounters a simple avowal of the essential nature of a character who, at the end of the narrative, is in no way different from what was present in the beginning. In this sense, Nostromo is rounder than Bakhtin's notion of the adventure-time hero, for Nostromo has been defiled by the actions he has taken to obtain the treasure. The character of a definitive adventure-time hero, Bakhtin proclaims, would bear no affects of his actions, regardless of their moral content.
That Hendrickson comprehends this aspect of Bakhtin's thought is made clear when he says that the chronotope of adventure-time applies only to Nostromo's sense of himself prior to his metamorphosis. This time, however, has ended. If Nostromo still retained his adventure-time persona, as a man incapable of being corrupted by the surrounding world, he would be unconcerned with those forces of historical and social change that oppose other men, prohibiting and eliminating those self-governing individuals from acting in accordance with their heroic or transcendental essences. Although Nostromo was such a man at one time, he has since become aware of his future economic prospects, and as a result the heroic Nostromo is now a man whose primary concern is to ensure that he will "grow rich very slowly." Nostromo has changed from a hero is the classical mode of romanticism to a hero in the modern sense, where hero is used ironically. This transformation underscores the move from folkloric adventure time to "modern economic time."
Describing the development of the literary text from ancient Greece to modern time, Bakhtin gives an account that could equally describe the transformative process that Nostromo undergoes. Succeeding civilizations brought about changes in a person's self-image, which was transformed as a result of the shifting nature of one's role in relation to thre world at large. With a self-image that was, to a large extent, obscured from view, humanity became exceedingly alonein this universe abandoned by speech, physicality and corporeality. Bakhtin, too, sees the alienated human being, who has fallen in a solipsistic view of the world, as having lost the unity and the wholeness that had been a product of his public origin. No longer privileged with the chronotope of the public, this hero could not find an equally real, unified and whole chronotope to supplement his metaphysical need. According to Bakhtin, it is often the case that when new spheres of consciousness first emerge in the life of the individual, the subject becomes "multi-layered and multi-faceted," and his inner and outer life become separate and antagonistic to one another. His inner and outer life newly separated, it is not surprising that Nostromo breaks down and loses his integrity as a result of his treachery.
Nostromo is concerned with the plurality of stories and histories that share the space of social reality, something that is reflected in various chronotopes that share the space and material of the novel as a whole. The story of a man's transformation from a figure of the romance hero to a modern hero or anti-hero resembles the evolutionary stages that Bakhtin ascribes to the novel as a literary form and, at the same time, personified the transformation of a country moving from a precapitalist to a capitalist society, bringing about those aspects of modernization that will unalterably effect its political future. In this sense, Nostromo is, like Darkness, an allegory of the succession of novelistic forms. Founded on the mythic history of its folkloric past, Sulaco's essential history is represented by a character whose story has been inscribed upon by two competing histories, Nostromo. Frederic Jameson sees Nostromo as expanding and enhancing the narrative apparatus that was first used in Lord; in his late novel Conrad takes material from the arena of the individual subject and applies it to the sphere of collective history. While critics such as Robert Penn Warren regard Nostromo as a novel about "the evolution of a political society," such claims obscure the fact that this novel is an adventure story where two heroes, Decoud and Nostromo, journey to a forbidden land in an attempt to find great treasure. I have previously made the point that Nostromo begins with the desolate images of the unpopulated Sulaco coast and concludes with the inauguration of a new society. For these reasons, then, Jameson considers Nostromo a meditation of the role of history. Unlike the works of modernist literature that are considered to be political or historical novels, this movement permits Nostromo a status as a novel where the historical process is not merely a novel feature, but is an intrinsic part of its form.
Expressing his disapproval, Jameson remarks that, after Conrad, a high modernism came to the fore where a "perfected poetic apparatus represses history just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the as yet uncentered subject." The relationship between Nostromo and Decoud can be viewed as one between the Self and its Ideal, a relationship that cannot be found as easily in Virginia Woolf's Waves. Whereas Nostromo and Decoud make up the opposing perspectives of a unified social consciousness, what Woolf does in Waves differs from Conrad in the sense that Woolf affirms the unification of reason in the play of consciousness. We shall investigate this in detail, using another one of Bakhtin's critical terms, polyphony, in a reading of Waves.
In Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics (1926), Bakhtin evaluates the literary status of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1881-1881), and then names the Russian novelist as someone whose work helped define the novelist's role in the process of creation. Essentially, this monumen tal task was accomplished when Dostoevsky created the polyphonic, or multi-voiced novel, thereby altering the writer's position from one of narrative omniscience to a status similar to that of a perceiving subject. After Dostoevsky, the novelist was no longer tied to a conception of the artist-creator as a being who stood at the origin-point of all speech utterances, as the central adjudicator of textual meaning. Dostoevsky's achievements affected the status of the novelist, re-fashioning the status of the artist into a receiver of vocalized discouse. This event was to have resounding effects in the history of literature. As Bakhtin says in his essay "The problem of the text": "After Dostoevsky, polyphony bursts powerfully into all world literature." Such powerful eruptions of polyphony made themselves manifest in modernists texts such as Woolf's The Waves (1931), a novel that brings on similar insights into the process of artistic creation.
According to Bakhtin, the Russian novelist established a dimension that allowed the reader to appreciate the novel as an artistic object; in doing so, he radically altered the process through which texts are created, bringing about a change in the way people understand and experience literature. This was accomplished through the inauguration of a new kind of novel, what Bakhtin calls the polyphonic novel, or the novel that possesses multiple voices. The quality of multivoicedness originates in the most distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky's texts, the existence of a number of artistic voices, each operating independently within the authorial consciousness of the narrative. In this respect Bakhtin can claim that "a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's works." Due to this original approach to distinguishing voices throughout the textual landscape, Dostoevsky can be credited with having produced a novel in both forms and content that was a departure of the traditional monologic literary text. By incorporating a new level of artistic breadth and magnitude into the novel, Dostoevsky moved awat from the monologic form of the novel and elevated the polyphonic form in its place.
While Virginia Woolf is not a marginal figure herself, her novel The Waves has been slandered and marginalized by various critics ever since its publication in 1931. For instance, in 1945 Arthur Koestler classified it, along with Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy and Proust's Swann's Way, as one of the great "masterpieces of dead ends." As recently as 1995, in the New York Times Book Review, the critic William Pritchard labeled Waves as an example of the "unreadable" Woolfian text. These comments do not do justice to this important experimental novel which provides a cogent analysis of the psychic evoluation of a group of individuals. Like Bakhtin's concept of the multivoiced novel, Waves is a novel about the composition of polyphony, a unity whose significance is rooted firmly in the multiple. Indeed, Waves is of great importance for the contemporary scholar, for it is in this novel that Woolf addressed many of the most problematic features of the modern subject.
The narrative of Waves relates the history of six characters, Neville, Susan, Rhoda, Jinny, Louis and Bernard, as the past through the phases of development together, from early childhood, through adolesence and into maturity. While this premise may sound pedestrian, Woolf's technique is far from conventional. Instead of a straightforward narrative account told from either a first-person or third-person perspective, Woolf's narrative is composed from not one but six streams of consciousness without any trace of authorial intentionality. Aside from several interchapters dominated by naturalized writing, the full scope of the novel including all of its actions and conversations, takes place within the characters' minds. This artistic technique is used from the very first page of the book. The six narrative voices will continue to be exchanged throughout the course of the novel. Gradually, a plot will begin to take shape through the interweaving of narrative features that inform the reader of the particular dimensions of each character. For this reason we can say that, despite its structural deviations, the story of Waves is nonetheless the story of a journey. The reader follows these six characters as they travel from an internalized cognitive state where they have access to multiple forms of consciousness to an externalized mode of being that abandons this multitude of potentialities in exchange for the indissoluably singular perspective of adulthood.
In order to distinguish these characters, they may be grouped in pairs according to their views of the self. A paid of male characters, Louis and Neville, are similar in that they are both absorbed in their thoughts on the future death of the self. Louis' desire to achieve a transcendent selfhood results in his deep alienation from life, while Neville looks at death through the eyes of the aesthetician. For these two characters, the experience of life and the knowledge of death cannot be harmonized. The pair of female characters, Susan and Jinny, in contrast to Louis and Neville, appear to move away from death and towards life. Susan is able to find stability through an alliance with the natural world, achieving person fulfillment by assuming a maternal role; however, as a result, her own identity continually eludes her. Jinny, on the other hand, finds her identity in the sensual ecstacy of the body; consequently, she feels at home in her body and in her world. The last two characters, Bernard and Rhoda, have the most curious relationship with the self. Bernard discovers that he has no single self, and consequently he possesses the ability to access multiple states of being. An internalized dreamer, Rhoda is unable to establish a stable concept of selfhood. According to the critic Sandra Kemp, her refusal to deviate from the fluid state of uncertainty leads her to commit suicide.
In her depiction of the bodiless state of early childhood, Woolf shows that there can be no direct conversation in the profoundly anonymous sphere of the solitary self, where each character begins his or her life. As they grow older, their emerging sexuality not only separates them but also joins them to others, as they each explore a series of relationships. This entry into sexuality is, for the characters, the pivotal moment of differentiation, for it is the physical act of love that sediments the undifferentiated body's transformation into a singular unit. Additionally, it is the characters experience of themselves as sexual being, or as Bakhtin says, it is their "erotic character" that delimits their corporeal experience and sets the boundaries of self-consciousness. In the shifting of being that accompanies the physical movement, they again catch a glimpse of the realm of potential possibilities they once had direct access to as children, when a symmatrical equilibrium allowed a seamless flow of consciousness made a series of multiple connections possible. In the period of young adulthood, the emphasis is on differences rather than similiarities, but when they become lovers they form a unified circle that enables them to transcend these differences; inevitably, due to the demands society makes on them, this circule breaks, sending them back into the lifeworld where they await death.
There is a seventh character that we have not touched on, Percival. Woolf uses this character to organize her six main voices into a forms of consciousness that is able to reveal the interconnections between the concept of the self and the life of the individual. While Percival does not speak, his death is a significant event in the novel, for it is through his death that the characters are force to accept that solidarity in a multiple world is ultimately impossible. The complete body of Percival is a crucial organizing device in Waves; he represents complete self-possession. For most of thew characters, his corpse signifies the desturction of those potential possibilities of the self that will never come to fruition. However, our two marginal figures, Bernard and Rhoda, react somewhat differently. Incorporating Percival into her own existence for a time, Rhoda awakens from her solitude. Bernard, too, experiences his death as a motive for personal transformation; his experience, however, is one of more lasting significance.
In the final pages of the novel, Benard brings the characters together onbe last time and takes over for the final sequence, providing us with an insight into the integral unity of both the central and marginal perspectives. Bernard considers the paths that his friends have taken, the overpowering fear of life that has led to Rhoda's suicide and the promiscuity that led Jinny to an equally destructive end, and find them both to be rules by the presence of death. Bernard turns away from the struggle between life and death and surrenders himself to the will of pure Being. Recognizing the permanent and final illusion of the world, Bernard discovers that the world is perfect as it is -- and with this insight everything reaches a degree of complete and utter simplicity, as life itself becomes, at last, a stable entity. He rufuses to surrender his belief in the transcendent complexity of nature and deliver a challenge of death, the force that negates life.
As Bernard opens the self once more and again finds a route of access to multiple paths of being, Woolf reveals that the post-structural or post-modern project is at the foundation of Waves. Bernard's challenge marks the abjuration of those power relations that allow death to dominate over the cultural world of society and the human world of love. Developing from the climax of the modernist moment, the project of postmodernity emerges in Woolf's text as consciousness, which expands through an increased awareness of death and sexuality, withdraws for the emergence of a new desire. As Woolf describes the early stage of psychic evolution, before these characters can oppose themselves to anything, there occurs a moment when we see six human beings standing beautifully complete in the rich plenitude of being; this is the moment of human triumph, as Woolf signals the creation of a unique voice.
Taking Bernard's transcendent selfhood as evidence that unity is established in the play of difference, Woolf presents a method of overcoming the binarism of the modern subject through the abandonment of a death-centered consciousness and through the integration of the sexual and psychic drives. Any opposition between center and margin is untenable, for it is the dichotomized society, the society of center and margin, that enacts the repression of death and the subjugation of both internal and external nature. By opening the self to a multiple perspective, Woolf opposes solipsism and overcomes the binary self in Bernard's epiphany of Being. Woolf leads us to a world that has conquered death, while Conrad observes how a quest for a totalized history leads the individual to the despair of alienation. In proposing the existence of a stable identity in the period of earely childhood, Woolf depicts a time when a seamless flow of consciousness made no distinction between self and other, marginal and central, original and representation; rather, at that time distinctions were made on the basis of images filtered between states of consciousness. With the first utterances of these six children, their individual perspectives begin to separate out in a fluid movement and it is this flowing motion that sustains the waves of common consciousness that Woolf wants to evoke, a lyricism that extends from the bodiless consciousness of youth to the identity-less body of adulthood. From their first meeting, where consciousness finds its origin in the aura of love to the last narrative sequence, where multiplicity emerges from the shadow of death, a process of unity and separation is evoked through a series of voices, obscuring the boundries of the self that blue with the passage of time and the road of the ocean.
Kemp understands statement such as Jinny's "I can imagine nothing beyond the circule cast by my own body," as representing the re-installing of the body as the center of all experience. She believes Woolf's goal is shared by several other female writers, including Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Sinclair. Their work comprises a groups of texts she terms "feminist post-modernist fiction." Kemp sees the work of female writers as being unlike texts composed by male writers, a view she obtained by extrapolating from Julia Kristeva's idea of "woman's time." Building on Kristeva's ideas, Kemp conceives of a feminist post-modernist fiction where an emphasis on the ideology of space displaces the modernist notions of historical time. Representation in Waves is governed by this notion of postmodern feminist fiction, establishing a space where "a fluctuation between the rhythms of childhood and the orders of adulthood" takes place. All attempts at representation having failed him, Bernard concludes: "But how to describe a world seen without a self ? There are no words. ... Look. This is the truth." In feminist postmodern fiction, there is no truth, only a gradual transformation. In her diary in 1920, Woolf claimed to have "arrived at some idea for a new form for a new novel, where one thing should open out of another." Bakhtin calls such sequences, which are not casually deduced, the "next-larger." As Woolf wrote in her diary: "Smooth narration which takes you from lunch to dinner is out. Distance, shadow and space are my objectives now." Feminist postmodern fiction transforms the novel into a spatial landscape which suspends the linear sequence of the masculine plot.
Just as the creation of a polyphonic novel is the pinnacle of Woolf's artistic achievement, Conrad's work finds its artistic culmination in a novel that centers around the use of the chronotope. While both Waves and Nostromo contain multiple voices, only the characters in Woolf's novel have truly autonomous voices, for it is only Woolf's work that contains an ideological consciousness that can trasnform the novel into a spatial landscape; in this way Waves eclipses the linear historical sequences of a masculine novel such as Conrad's Nostromo. Woolf slows down the process through which the polyphonic text is organized and transfomed, leaving the crystallized structure of Nostromo in its wake, as the reader witnesses the establishment of the human personality as it passes from pre-psychical formation to a violent encounter with the limits of the self. Whereas Conrad sought to elide the fundamental problem of the modern subject, creating a work whose surface articulated itself through the use of chronotopic features, Woolf was able to exceed Conrad by developing a polyphonic novel that extirpated those superstructural elements that Conrad sought to obscure. As seen from the begative critiques of Woolf's novel, Waves was not celebrated for this achievement. It is worth noting the Pritchard and Koestler criticized Waves for exhibiting a kind of literary depravity, seeing Woolf as having interiorized her narrative consciousness for purely voyeuristic motives. This mirrors the way Bakhtin dismissed Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, denouncing those books for their "decadent degenerate psychologism."
In view of this fact one might reason that Bakhtin would recognize Waves as bearing the markings of Dostoevsky's revolutionary poetics. Woolf's work, like Dostoevsky's novels, is marked by what Bakhtin calls "the fundamental open-endedness" of the dialogue of voices in the text. Like the majority of Dostoevsky's texts, which close with the re-establishment of "a conventionally literary, conventionally monologic ending," Woolf ends Waves with a long passage from the viewpoint of Bernard. However, unlike these Dostoevskian texts, Bernard is fundamentally unable to re-create the word in terms of the univocal consciousness he once shared with his friends; Woolf's novel wishes for but is unable to supply a similarly monologic, conventional ending. I believe that both Waves and Nostromo would satisfy Bakhtin's requirement of the polyphonic novel, fore both novels are "dialogic through and through." Yet unlike Conrad, Woolf refuses to deviate from her internatlized narrational consciousness, the only exception being brief naturalistic chapters that bridge one consciousness to another. That Conrad fails to make a similar attempt enables Woolf's postmodern ideology of space to supersede Conrad's modernist appraisal of historical time. However, without Conrad as her historical precedent, Woolf would be unable to reconfigure his advancements in the literature of modern subjectivity.
In the last three chapters, we have seen how Conrad and Woolf view the formation of the modern subject and the illusions that are frequently part of its ideological makeup. This final chapter will be devoted to the two different ways in which Conrad and Woolf attempt to resolve the problem outlined above. In this chapter I will be using two concepts developed in the writings of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). His concept of the choronotope will be used in our reading of Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo (1904) and his concept of polyphony will be used to shed light on Woolf's novel The Waves (1931). These two theories will help us to understand how Conrad and Woolf found different methods to explore the relationship between self and society.
Bakhtin introduces the term chronotope in his essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1938; revised 1973) in order to illustrate the connection of the temporal and spatial relationships in works of literature. In his view the literary text contains a number of unique features. Specifically, Bakhtin felt that the novel represents an "orchestration" of many voices, a heteroglossic multi-voicedness not limited to the speeches of the characters that the author has transcribed, but may also include those voices in the indirect or implicit dialogues within the text. Bakhtin's conception of "dialogue" may imply a range larger than that of two parties only; any number of participants may be involved in a Bakhtinian dialogue. In Bakhtin's view, the narrator does not assume the status of an editor who represents dialogue in paraphrases but instead the narrator, as an objective expert, reproduces the image of the characters in language as faithfully as possible. As a result Bakhtin says that the narrator's voice is essentially "double-voiced and double-languaged."
To substantiate his claim, he offers a historical overview of the chronotopes that signify various stages in the history of literature, ranging from early genres such as Greek romances to the folkloric mode of Rabelais. While his primary examples are taken from late Classical and Renaissance literature, he also employs many examples from modern novelists. Although Bakhtin does not mention Conrad, Gene Moore believes that Conrad's novels can be used to demonstrate Bakhtin's concepts. Understanding Bakhtin's view of meaning to be fundamentally dialogic, not individual or monologic, Moore's reading of Nostromo sees the double authority of the voices of Nostromo and Decoud, not to mention the multiple authority coming from the other voices in the text, as a prime example of the dialogic condition of speech. The island of the Great Isabel is remote from Costaguana not only geographically but also temporally, or rather temporo-spatially, or chronotopically, as it is created through the compression of narrational time and space.
Most literary critics agree that an important feature of Nostromo is its concern with history. In fact, Eloise Knapp Hay feels that the historical process can be seen as the main character in Nostromo. Bruce Hendrickson qualifies Hay's statement, saying that this history is essentially characterological, for it is composed of many individual "micronarratives." Conrad's perception of the historical process as something composed from many personal stories makes Nostromo different from Conrad's other works such as Lord. The perspective Nostromo obtains is due to the presence of both epic elements, such as an omniscient narrator and a diverse body of characters, and modern elements, include his geo-political themes and unconventional time-sequence. These qualities allow Conrad to present Sulaco, a fictional city whose narrative represents the "problematics of history and genealogy." Another critic, Benita Parry, sees Nostromo as an inquiry into the significance of history that at once grants a central role to the historical perspective and, at the same time, regards that centrality with scorn. Parry offers the fact that Conrad shifts the weight of his story from grand narratives of genealogy to telling stories about specific characters as evidence that he both legitimizes and de-legitimizes the role of history in this text. Regardless of which critical opinion is deemed correct, it is clear that this novels affects the status of the modern subject by working in conjunction with history.
In the opening of the novel, Conrad writes that "In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterward, the town of Sulaco...had never been anything commercially more important than a coasting port." With these words he has already begun to create the social and genealogical past that will enable him to dramatize the problematic aspects of the city's political future. Further instances of how Conrad contextualizes the history of the land occur when he remarks on how the environment of the city bears few traces of the Spaniards who ruled much of South America. This is because the Spanish armada, needing a strong win to move ahead, found Sulaco was protected by "the prevailing calm of a vast gulf." Consequently Sulaco became known to sailors as a protected city, safe from the Spanish conquerors because of it inaccessible location. As a results, Conrad writes, the town remained cloistered as an "inviolable sanctuary," a hidden world amid the subdued tempo of the Golfo Placido. Using language to invoke a sense of the monolithic landscape surrounding Sulaco, Conrad writes that the city was laid out upon the land as if "within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with mourning draperies of cloud." This passage gives the reader an expansive sense of space, for in this territory the individual finds himself dwarfed by the surroundings; indeed, Conrad's description of the environment contains elements that could equally describe the formal features of a Greek amphitheater. Moreover, Conrad's description connoted the feelings of a religious presence invested deep within this land that is constructed like a primitive temple.
In further descriptions of the cartography of Sulaco, Conrad invests the land with a history that includes genealogies of both a social and spiritual nature. As legend has it, when two fortune-seeking sailors from America came to Sulaco to steal the gold contained in its mines, their souls were condemned to wander the earth forever. According to the fable the American treasure-hunters are still there, their ghostly presences guarding the caves of fabulous wealth. Having faded into mythology, such stories have become part of the mythological consciousness of the Sulaco natives, a consciousness that is directly connected to a landscape that stands against a divided sky, "a bright patch of blue haze" on one side, and "the bright skirt of the horizon" on the other. Divided in this way, the sky resembles the bountiful Christian world that stands in opposition to the pagan world of heretics and thieves. Sulaco is a land that is distinctly set apart from Europe, shorn off by a boundary line that, while imperceptible, is nonetheless definitive. Upon crossing this boundary, European ships that set course for Sulaco find that, suddenly and without warning, they lack the windpower needed to complete their journey. Hence, Sulaco enjoyed the privilege of being a privatized world, untainted by the imperialistic ideology that infected the nations of Europe. The great importance attributed to the landscape of Sulaco is stressed throughout the novel, and will be emphasize for the last time in the novel's concluding sentence, when Dr. Monygham contemplates Nostromo's "passionate" triumph in this world where "bright white clouds shine like a mass of solid silver." Although Hendrickson finds this line to be a curious paradox, I find this image of an "insubstantial permanence" to be a quite appropriate one to use when describing Nostromo, a man who is composed of qualities that are, in many respects, paradoxical and contradictory.
It is at this point that Hendrickson introduces Bakhtin's concept of the chornotope. Conrad's continual emphasis on environmental features resembles Bakhtin's conception of the ancient epic and drama. Bakhtin discovers that, in ancient epic drama, the author dealt with concepts of time and space by thinki8ng of the world in a profoundly anthropological manner. To a citizen of ancient Greece, says Bakhtin, the natural world was deeply invested with a sense of mythological space linked with mythological time, and this combination was used to redefine the world of ancient Greece into an elaborate tableau of anthropomorphic illusion and spectacle. Stages as a tableau of temporal motifs, the world of ancient Greece was seen as a narrative tableau whose mannerisms, gestures and expressions were in imitation of a great work of art. Finding expression most clearly in productions of artistic literature, Bakhtin's use of the term chronotope stands for that perspective in which time is linked with space. Literary chronotopes, he declares, may be used to illuminate both spatial and temporal dimensions into a unified perspective in such a way that time becomes a material presence subject to spatial alterations, while space becomes a temporal entity subject to the passage of time. For Bakhtin, the critical task of evaluating the artistic nature of the chronotope is found by judging the degree to which these two main indicators, time and space, traverse and penetrate one another.
The fact that time has stopped for the city of Sulaco may be evidenced by looking at several passages. When a wealthy English banker visits the town he exclaims, "Has anything happened here for a hundred years before?" In addition, the legend of the two gold prospectors who have been condemned to haunt the Sulaco mines for eternity contributes to this image of Sulaco as a place where time has been suspended. As Hendrickson points out, Conrad makes a striking use of the time-space chronotope when, in the later half of the novel, Nostromo and the journalist Martin Decoud are stranded on the island of the Great Isabel. This is an example of events in real time being overtaken and supplanted by an event that happens only in mythic time. With this real event reflecting on the legendary fable of the two lost prospectors, it is almost as if the two actions, one mythic and one material, have become intertwines with one another. The fact that these stories about two pairs of individuals have been subsumed within the mythical consciousness of the people can be ascertained when Barrios says that, like the mythical sailors, Decoud and the gold have been lost forever.
Having been left alone by Nostromo for a succession of days, Decoud "had died in want of faith of himself and others." After spending one full day on the island of the Great Isabel, Decoud lies down in the tall grass and gazes wearily at the sea that surrounds him. He wonders aloud how he has not seen a single bird or beast for the entire day. Upon speaking to himself, Decoud realizes the utter desolation of his surroundings, for the only sound he has heard all day has been the sound of his own voice. Without sound, without sleep, without food, without human contact, Decoud remains in a supine position, "either on his back or on his face." The following insight gives the reader a clear insight into Decoud's state of mind, revealing the degree to which isolation has overtaken him: "Solitude of mere outward conditions of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and skepticism have no place." Decoud's experience of a complete and barren solitude is the curse known to all but a few, the sickness that only the simplest are able to survive. Under such conditions, Conrad writes, the mind may grow wild and irrational, no longer held in check by the civilized world, and for the reason Decoud finds his thoughts "driven into the exile of utter disbelief." In this state of complete solitude, perspectives of social criticism such as irony and skepticism truly have no place.
After three days of waiting for Nostromo to return, Decoud begins to find reasons to doubt his own existence as a thinking, willing human being. He feels his consciousness slipping into "the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and the forces of nature." After five days of waiting, Decoud finds these feelings of being divorced from himself to be overpowering, and he chooses to wallow in his depression and abandons his thoughts for the people of Costaguana, a political struggle that now seems far removed and inconsequential. After ten days have passed, Martin Decoud's encounter with the chronotope takes place, as the solitary passage of time transforms itself into a palpable material presence. It is at this point that Decoud becomes transfixed by an image that will determine the course of his life. No longer believing in the reality of the material world, Decoud loses faith in himself and forgets his own existence as a human being. Stripped of his formative past and lacking hope for a productive future, Decoud becomes aware of an image that represents the spatial and temporal aspects of his confinement. Decoud's growing fascination with what he sees as a "thin cord" is an example of Conrad's use of the chronotope in this novel, for this cord represents his life both spatially and temporally. The cord represents the spatial environment of the Great Isabel, which is dominated by a vast silence: "The solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without any sort of emotions whatever." In addition, the cord stands for the temporal dimension of Decoud's confinement as he spends his days watching the silence that hung "like a still cord stretched to breaking-point." Viewing his life as increasingly futile and purposeless, at this point Decoud retrieves the pistol that Nostromo had left for him. When the brilliant thinker Martin Decoud commits suicide by shooting himself, he no longer believes in anything, and Conrad memorialized him as "a victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity."
This scene is particularly noteworthy because here Conrad indicated the Decoud's consciousness undergoes a fundamental change when he finds himself increasingly alienated from society. The precise nature of this change can be found using Kenneth Burke's section on alienation in his "Dictionary of Pivotal Terms." In the first section of this essay he attempts to explain the philosophic basis behind this term that has become a ubiquitous feature of the modern period. The term, originally used by the philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Diderot, was later employed by Hegel before it became a dominant feature of Marxist terminology. This term derives from the feeling of disconnection that surfaces when a person feels utterly bewildered by a world that seems essentially foreign to the rational mind. According to Burke, there are two forms of alienation, material and spiritual. Material alienation arises when a person is unable to obtain those things that most members of society consider the basic standards of living. Spiritual alienation occurs when, having suffered from this 'abnormal' state for a length of time, a person begins to consider alternatives that, in a rational state of mind, one would reject.
While the world seems unconcerned with human consciousness, the alienated human being longs to experience a sense of connection. The individual's need to "repossess the world" is often met by his becoming affiliated with ideologies that offer new modes of thinking about the purpose of one's life. Although Decoud's alienation stems from his loneliness and the utter desolation of his surroundings, Burke says that alienation can occur anywhere, even among people who receive substantial material benefits from the society they inhabit. Burke cites the nobles of the French Enlightenment as an example of this class who were "materially rewarded but spiritually alienated." It was this class of people who encouraged the French Revolution of 1778 by becoming friendly with the Encyclopedists and, Burke predicts, the materially rewarded but spiritually alienated citizens of modern America may be the ones who are most attracted to the Marxist critique of capitalism. It is this same section of society, Burke says, that may eventually incite a second American revolution guided by a principles of Marxism.
Naturally, with the loss of faith in rationality, the alienated individual also experiences an erosion of faith in religious principles and, to offset this loss in ideological perspective, Burke observes that a "compensatory increase in sensuality" emerges out of the alienated social body. However, there is a supplement for such alienation from religious principles. Through the "immediacy of the senses" alienated individuals attempt to reclaim a world they can no longer relate to, a world that has grown alien. While at first glance it may seem that Conrad's record of Decoud's progressive alienation bears no traces of "compensatory" sensuality, nevertheless Decoud's placement in a non-sensual world devoid of human features poses an equally destructive environment for this intellectual who believes himself to be a member of the proletariat. Finding himself isolated from all humanity, Decoud discovers that he has become radically disconnected from the social environment he was once part of. That he has been alienated from those grand narratives of religious ideology that provide the individual with stability and order may be ascertained from statements such as "He beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images" and "He believed in nothing." Unlike the Greeks, who were able to observe the human world wrapped in a spatial-temporal narrative tableau, Decoud's alienation springs from his inability to locate his image in the natural world. Unable to project his image onto an alien world, in time Decoud becomes completely alienated, his identity being submerged beneath a simulacrum of a self that is no longer an active participant in the world.
In his essay "Order," Burke writes about the work of Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher who established the rationalist ground for solipsism, the belief that there are no external objects in the world except the self. Burke notes that, when looking back at the history of philosophy, we realize that Bentham's concept of "fictitious entities" stands for a conceptual idea and not a material thing, that is, it stands for sign and not signifiers. For this reason Bentham's solipsism is more of a critical attitude towards the world, and not a rationally-orderered philosophy of perception. However, due to his sense of alienation from the world, Decoud falls into a solipsistic view of the universe; he believes that Nostromo has been killed, and that all of the people he loves in Sulaco have disappeared. It is at this point that Decoud becomes fixated once again by the image of the cord, a manifestation of the spatial-temporal chonotope mentioned above. Composed of both space and time, Decoud longs to hear the cord as it snaps. Even though it would mean that his life would end, by hearing the cord of life as it splits apart, Decoud would receive confirmation of his fading belief in the existence of external objects. Realizing that the sound of the cord would not be heard while he is still on the island, Decoud wades into the water, filling his pockets with gold ingots he had collected with Nostromo. Ironically, Decoud sinks into the water without a sound, surrounded by the eternal silence of the placid gulf. In this story Conrad reveals how deeply the individual consciousness can be affected by exposure to an impersonal environment abstracted from the physical world, as it has in the case of Decoud's fatal alienation.
By adapting the myth of a treasure linked to the supernatural to the conditions of a frontier country in a period of colonial imperialism, Conrad interweaves the emblems of folkloric history with those of modern politics. According to the mythos of folklore, a treasure is always a powerful objects that confers great benefits on those who, through physical and moral fortitude and profound spiritual awareness, pass the test of character and are able to use it properly. Developing the folkloric chonotope contained in the myth of the two gringos, Conrad produces a chonotope that not only pervades the sweeping use of time within the space of the novel, but portends future incidents as well. In Dorothy Van Ghent's view, the focal point of Nostromo is the guardianship of a treasure, a subjects commonly used in folkloric literature. Nostromo's name, meaning "our man," emblematizes his stature as a natural manas the Man of the People, and his lack of a cultivated conscience symbolizes his unwavering honesty and fierce loyalty. Folkloric elements pervade the novel, including Conrad's portrayal of Gould, who is constructed in "archetypal language that signifies the exotic foreignness of his moral purity." Conrad's use of language in Nostromo fails to exhibit the richness one might expect from the author of Darkness. In Nostromo, when a female character is described as "A picturesque woman in a pose of maternal exaltation, Conrad employs a generalized phrasing that renders a figure already outlined in the image-repetoire of modern readers. But it is a functional phrasing nonetheless, for it communicates the image that is needed, "an impersonal, classical kind of image." Through Conrad's depiction of this classical set of characters, Van Ghent says, "a classical typology is achieved that deepens and strengthens the comprehensive human perspective in which events in Costaguana are placed." These elements are taken by Sooyoung Chon as evidence that Conrad, in creating a text that on the surface fails to articulate a modernist notion of truth, has reached his last phase of artistic development. Even though Conrad produced several more novels after Nostromo, Chon believes that this novels represents the apex of Conrad's artistic life in that is is "more akin to contemporary sensibilities." I myself do not feel that Chon's statement is plausible for I do not feel that Conrad's work should be equated with the work of the postmodern artist who, according to Frederic Jameson, sees surface meaning as "the supreme formal feature" of his work. That this was not Conrad's intention can be proven through a letter he wrote to John Galsworthy in 1898, where he expounded his belief that "the force in a book is in the fidelity to the surface of life, to the surface of events--to the surface of things and ideas. Now this is not being shallow." Unlike the postmodern artist, Conrad's surfaces are not depthless but are, on the contrary, full of meaning.
The island of the Great Isabel, a space where time is of vital importance, is also the place where Decoud experiences a profound sense of the dissolution of time. That Decoud is unable to chart the course of time's passage is underscored by the narrator, who continually mentions this fact, adding day after day to his captivity. A concatenation of days falls upon Decoud who, in reaction to his isolation from the world, dissolves while the narrator enumerated the days and nights which pass over him, from the end of the first day to each succeeding day. The days pass by one after another, differing little until, after ten days have passed, the narrator stops referring to the calendar passage of time. Perhaps this is because Decoud himself is unaware of how much time has elapsed. On his final day, the narrator remarks that Decouds observes the passage of time by gauging the sun's distance from the horizon line; it is at this point that Decoud's disjunction from the standard measure of him has brought about the blurring of his subjective sense of time. Decoud is oppressed by the weight of numberless days spent in perpetual isolation. He takes his own life by submerging himself in the water, his pockets weighted with the valuable gold ingots he and Nostromo were in search of. This incident is not related directly; rather, the suicide is recounted within the story of Nostromo's return to the Great Isabel. The critic Edward Said names this feature an example of Conrad's use of "delayed decoding," a term first used by another critic, Ian Watt. Conrad employs this technique, he says, "to dramatize the problematic relation between the past and the present." Conrad's reader is forced to re-read and try to work out the events presented by the narrator. According to Said, Conrad's use of the retrospective mode in this instance is insignificant, since Nostromo's wealth stems directly from his desertion of Decoud on the Great Isabel. Reputedly famous for his incorruptibility, Nostromo becomes a traitor who may be blamed for Decoud's death and he recognized that his actions must remain undisclosed. Paradoxically, Hendrickson says, Nostromo remains 'our man' of the republic in that he signifies how the development of a society is contingent on "violence, forgetfulness and repression."
Hendrickson sees Nostromo's return from the Great Isabel and his rebirth after fourteen hours of sleep to be a transition point from one temporal orientation to another. Up to this point Nostromo has been, like Tuan Jim, a mythic or folkloric hero in the eyes of others and in his own eyes. Hendrickson feels that underneath Nostromo's mythic quality is the fact that he seems to be immune from aging; perhaps Nostromo lives what Bakhtin calls "the adventure time of the hero." This time is exemplified in the adventure time of Greek romance, a chonotope whose significance lies in its being the most abstruse and, simultaneously, the most unchanging of all chronotopes. Under this chronotope the world and the individual are both entirely resistant to change. The individual lives without the possibility of personal development or transforming as a character. Regardless of the changes brought about by the narrative, no matter how far-reaching they appear to be, this character's world remains perpetually the same, exempt from the forces of revision and recreation that affect everybody by the adventure-time hero. Instead of any characterological evolution, which the modern reader has come to expect, the adventure-time reader encounters a simple avowal of the essential nature of a character who, at the end of the narrative, is in no way different from what was present in the beginning. In this sense, Nostromo is rounder than Bakhtin's notion of the adventure-time hero, for Nostromo has been defiled by the actions he has taken to obtain the treasure. The character of a definitive adventure-time hero, Bakhtin proclaims, would bear no affects of his actions, regardless of their moral content.
That Hendrickson comprehends this aspect of Bakhtin's thought is made clear when he says that the chronotope of adventure-time applies only to Nostromo's sense of himself prior to his metamorphosis. This time, however, has ended. If Nostromo still retained his adventure-time persona, as a man incapable of being corrupted by the surrounding world, he would be unconcerned with those forces of historical and social change that oppose other men, prohibiting and eliminating those self-governing individuals from acting in accordance with their heroic or transcendental essences. Although Nostromo was such a man at one time, he has since become aware of his future economic prospects, and as a result the heroic Nostromo is now a man whose primary concern is to ensure that he will "grow rich very slowly." Nostromo has changed from a hero is the classical mode of romanticism to a hero in the modern sense, where hero is used ironically. This transformation underscores the move from folkloric adventure time to "modern economic time."
Describing the development of the literary text from ancient Greece to modern time, Bakhtin gives an account that could equally describe the transformative process that Nostromo undergoes. Succeeding civilizations brought about changes in a person's self-image, which was transformed as a result of the shifting nature of one's role in relation to thre world at large. With a self-image that was, to a large extent, obscured from view, humanity became exceedingly alonein this universe abandoned by speech, physicality and corporeality. Bakhtin, too, sees the alienated human being, who has fallen in a solipsistic view of the world, as having lost the unity and the wholeness that had been a product of his public origin. No longer privileged with the chronotope of the public, this hero could not find an equally real, unified and whole chronotope to supplement his metaphysical need. According to Bakhtin, it is often the case that when new spheres of consciousness first emerge in the life of the individual, the subject becomes "multi-layered and multi-faceted," and his inner and outer life become separate and antagonistic to one another. His inner and outer life newly separated, it is not surprising that Nostromo breaks down and loses his integrity as a result of his treachery.
Nostromo is concerned with the plurality of stories and histories that share the space of social reality, something that is reflected in various chronotopes that share the space and material of the novel as a whole. The story of a man's transformation from a figure of the romance hero to a modern hero or anti-hero resembles the evolutionary stages that Bakhtin ascribes to the novel as a literary form and, at the same time, personified the transformation of a country moving from a precapitalist to a capitalist society, bringing about those aspects of modernization that will unalterably effect its political future. In this sense, Nostromo is, like Darkness, an allegory of the succession of novelistic forms. Founded on the mythic history of its folkloric past, Sulaco's essential history is represented by a character whose story has been inscribed upon by two competing histories, Nostromo. Frederic Jameson sees Nostromo as expanding and enhancing the narrative apparatus that was first used in Lord; in his late novel Conrad takes material from the arena of the individual subject and applies it to the sphere of collective history. While critics such as Robert Penn Warren regard Nostromo as a novel about "the evolution of a political society," such claims obscure the fact that this novel is an adventure story where two heroes, Decoud and Nostromo, journey to a forbidden land in an attempt to find great treasure. I have previously made the point that Nostromo begins with the desolate images of the unpopulated Sulaco coast and concludes with the inauguration of a new society. For these reasons, then, Jameson considers Nostromo a meditation of the role of history. Unlike the works of modernist literature that are considered to be political or historical novels, this movement permits Nostromo a status as a novel where the historical process is not merely a novel feature, but is an intrinsic part of its form.
Expressing his disapproval, Jameson remarks that, after Conrad, a high modernism came to the fore where a "perfected poetic apparatus represses history just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the as yet uncentered subject." The relationship between Nostromo and Decoud can be viewed as one between the Self and its Ideal, a relationship that cannot be found as easily in Virginia Woolf's Waves. Whereas Nostromo and Decoud make up the opposing perspectives of a unified social consciousness, what Woolf does in Waves differs from Conrad in the sense that Woolf affirms the unification of reason in the play of consciousness. We shall investigate this in detail, using another one of Bakhtin's critical terms, polyphony, in a reading of Waves.
In Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics (1926), Bakhtin evaluates the literary status of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1881-1881), and then names the Russian novelist as someone whose work helped define the novelist's role in the process of creation. Essentially, this monumen tal task was accomplished when Dostoevsky created the polyphonic, or multi-voiced novel, thereby altering the writer's position from one of narrative omniscience to a status similar to that of a perceiving subject. After Dostoevsky, the novelist was no longer tied to a conception of the artist-creator as a being who stood at the origin-point of all speech utterances, as the central adjudicator of textual meaning. Dostoevsky's achievements affected the status of the novelist, re-fashioning the status of the artist into a receiver of vocalized discouse. This event was to have resounding effects in the history of literature. As Bakhtin says in his essay "The problem of the text": "After Dostoevsky, polyphony bursts powerfully into all world literature." Such powerful eruptions of polyphony made themselves manifest in modernists texts such as Woolf's The Waves (1931), a novel that brings on similar insights into the process of artistic creation.
According to Bakhtin, the Russian novelist established a dimension that allowed the reader to appreciate the novel as an artistic object; in doing so, he radically altered the process through which texts are created, bringing about a change in the way people understand and experience literature. This was accomplished through the inauguration of a new kind of novel, what Bakhtin calls the polyphonic novel, or the novel that possesses multiple voices. The quality of multivoicedness originates in the most distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky's texts, the existence of a number of artistic voices, each operating independently within the authorial consciousness of the narrative. In this respect Bakhtin can claim that "a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's works." Due to this original approach to distinguishing voices throughout the textual landscape, Dostoevsky can be credited with having produced a novel in both forms and content that was a departure of the traditional monologic literary text. By incorporating a new level of artistic breadth and magnitude into the novel, Dostoevsky moved awat from the monologic form of the novel and elevated the polyphonic form in its place.
While Virginia Woolf is not a marginal figure herself, her novel The Waves has been slandered and marginalized by various critics ever since its publication in 1931. For instance, in 1945 Arthur Koestler classified it, along with Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy and Proust's Swann's Way, as one of the great "masterpieces of dead ends." As recently as 1995, in the New York Times Book Review, the critic William Pritchard labeled Waves as an example of the "unreadable" Woolfian text. These comments do not do justice to this important experimental novel which provides a cogent analysis of the psychic evoluation of a group of individuals. Like Bakhtin's concept of the multivoiced novel, Waves is a novel about the composition of polyphony, a unity whose significance is rooted firmly in the multiple. Indeed, Waves is of great importance for the contemporary scholar, for it is in this novel that Woolf addressed many of the most problematic features of the modern subject.
The narrative of Waves relates the history of six characters, Neville, Susan, Rhoda, Jinny, Louis and Bernard, as the past through the phases of development together, from early childhood, through adolesence and into maturity. While this premise may sound pedestrian, Woolf's technique is far from conventional. Instead of a straightforward narrative account told from either a first-person or third-person perspective, Woolf's narrative is composed from not one but six streams of consciousness without any trace of authorial intentionality. Aside from several interchapters dominated by naturalized writing, the full scope of the novel including all of its actions and conversations, takes place within the characters' minds. This artistic technique is used from the very first page of the book. The six narrative voices will continue to be exchanged throughout the course of the novel. Gradually, a plot will begin to take shape through the interweaving of narrative features that inform the reader of the particular dimensions of each character. For this reason we can say that, despite its structural deviations, the story of Waves is nonetheless the story of a journey. The reader follows these six characters as they travel from an internalized cognitive state where they have access to multiple forms of consciousness to an externalized mode of being that abandons this multitude of potentialities in exchange for the indissoluably singular perspective of adulthood.
In order to distinguish these characters, they may be grouped in pairs according to their views of the self. A paid of male characters, Louis and Neville, are similar in that they are both absorbed in their thoughts on the future death of the self. Louis' desire to achieve a transcendent selfhood results in his deep alienation from life, while Neville looks at death through the eyes of the aesthetician. For these two characters, the experience of life and the knowledge of death cannot be harmonized. The pair of female characters, Susan and Jinny, in contrast to Louis and Neville, appear to move away from death and towards life. Susan is able to find stability through an alliance with the natural world, achieving person fulfillment by assuming a maternal role; however, as a result, her own identity continually eludes her. Jinny, on the other hand, finds her identity in the sensual ecstacy of the body; consequently, she feels at home in her body and in her world. The last two characters, Bernard and Rhoda, have the most curious relationship with the self. Bernard discovers that he has no single self, and consequently he possesses the ability to access multiple states of being. An internalized dreamer, Rhoda is unable to establish a stable concept of selfhood. According to the critic Sandra Kemp, her refusal to deviate from the fluid state of uncertainty leads her to commit suicide.
In her depiction of the bodiless state of early childhood, Woolf shows that there can be no direct conversation in the profoundly anonymous sphere of the solitary self, where each character begins his or her life. As they grow older, their emerging sexuality not only separates them but also joins them to others, as they each explore a series of relationships. This entry into sexuality is, for the characters, the pivotal moment of differentiation, for it is the physical act of love that sediments the undifferentiated body's transformation into a singular unit. Additionally, it is the characters experience of themselves as sexual being, or as Bakhtin says, it is their "erotic character" that delimits their corporeal experience and sets the boundaries of self-consciousness. In the shifting of being that accompanies the physical movement, they again catch a glimpse of the realm of potential possibilities they once had direct access to as children, when a symmatrical equilibrium allowed a seamless flow of consciousness made a series of multiple connections possible. In the period of young adulthood, the emphasis is on differences rather than similiarities, but when they become lovers they form a unified circle that enables them to transcend these differences; inevitably, due to the demands society makes on them, this circule breaks, sending them back into the lifeworld where they await death.
There is a seventh character that we have not touched on, Percival. Woolf uses this character to organize her six main voices into a forms of consciousness that is able to reveal the interconnections between the concept of the self and the life of the individual. While Percival does not speak, his death is a significant event in the novel, for it is through his death that the characters are force to accept that solidarity in a multiple world is ultimately impossible. The complete body of Percival is a crucial organizing device in Waves; he represents complete self-possession. For most of thew characters, his corpse signifies the desturction of those potential possibilities of the self that will never come to fruition. However, our two marginal figures, Bernard and Rhoda, react somewhat differently. Incorporating Percival into her own existence for a time, Rhoda awakens from her solitude. Bernard, too, experiences his death as a motive for personal transformation; his experience, however, is one of more lasting significance.
In the final pages of the novel, Benard brings the characters together onbe last time and takes over for the final sequence, providing us with an insight into the integral unity of both the central and marginal perspectives. Bernard considers the paths that his friends have taken, the overpowering fear of life that has led to Rhoda's suicide and the promiscuity that led Jinny to an equally destructive end, and find them both to be rules by the presence of death. Bernard turns away from the struggle between life and death and surrenders himself to the will of pure Being. Recognizing the permanent and final illusion of the world, Bernard discovers that the world is perfect as it is -- and with this insight everything reaches a degree of complete and utter simplicity, as life itself becomes, at last, a stable entity. He rufuses to surrender his belief in the transcendent complexity of nature and deliver a challenge of death, the force that negates life.
As Bernard opens the self once more and again finds a route of access to multiple paths of being, Woolf reveals that the post-structural or post-modern project is at the foundation of Waves. Bernard's challenge marks the abjuration of those power relations that allow death to dominate over the cultural world of society and the human world of love. Developing from the climax of the modernist moment, the project of postmodernity emerges in Woolf's text as consciousness, which expands through an increased awareness of death and sexuality, withdraws for the emergence of a new desire. As Woolf describes the early stage of psychic evolution, before these characters can oppose themselves to anything, there occurs a moment when we see six human beings standing beautifully complete in the rich plenitude of being; this is the moment of human triumph, as Woolf signals the creation of a unique voice.
Taking Bernard's transcendent selfhood as evidence that unity is established in the play of difference, Woolf presents a method of overcoming the binarism of the modern subject through the abandonment of a death-centered consciousness and through the integration of the sexual and psychic drives. Any opposition between center and margin is untenable, for it is the dichotomized society, the society of center and margin, that enacts the repression of death and the subjugation of both internal and external nature. By opening the self to a multiple perspective, Woolf opposes solipsism and overcomes the binary self in Bernard's epiphany of Being. Woolf leads us to a world that has conquered death, while Conrad observes how a quest for a totalized history leads the individual to the despair of alienation. In proposing the existence of a stable identity in the period of earely childhood, Woolf depicts a time when a seamless flow of consciousness made no distinction between self and other, marginal and central, original and representation; rather, at that time distinctions were made on the basis of images filtered between states of consciousness. With the first utterances of these six children, their individual perspectives begin to separate out in a fluid movement and it is this flowing motion that sustains the waves of common consciousness that Woolf wants to evoke, a lyricism that extends from the bodiless consciousness of youth to the identity-less body of adulthood. From their first meeting, where consciousness finds its origin in the aura of love to the last narrative sequence, where multiplicity emerges from the shadow of death, a process of unity and separation is evoked through a series of voices, obscuring the boundries of the self that blue with the passage of time and the road of the ocean.
Kemp understands statement such as Jinny's "I can imagine nothing beyond the circule cast by my own body," as representing the re-installing of the body as the center of all experience. She believes Woolf's goal is shared by several other female writers, including Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Sinclair. Their work comprises a groups of texts she terms "feminist post-modernist fiction." Kemp sees the work of female writers as being unlike texts composed by male writers, a view she obtained by extrapolating from Julia Kristeva's idea of "woman's time." Building on Kristeva's ideas, Kemp conceives of a feminist post-modernist fiction where an emphasis on the ideology of space displaces the modernist notions of historical time. Representation in Waves is governed by this notion of postmodern feminist fiction, establishing a space where "a fluctuation between the rhythms of childhood and the orders of adulthood" takes place. All attempts at representation having failed him, Bernard concludes: "But how to describe a world seen without a self ? There are no words. ... Look. This is the truth." In feminist postmodern fiction, there is no truth, only a gradual transformation. In her diary in 1920, Woolf claimed to have "arrived at some idea for a new form for a new novel, where one thing should open out of another." Bakhtin calls such sequences, which are not casually deduced, the "next-larger." As Woolf wrote in her diary: "Smooth narration which takes you from lunch to dinner is out. Distance, shadow and space are my objectives now." Feminist postmodern fiction transforms the novel into a spatial landscape which suspends the linear sequence of the masculine plot.
Just as the creation of a polyphonic novel is the pinnacle of Woolf's artistic achievement, Conrad's work finds its artistic culmination in a novel that centers around the use of the chronotope. While both Waves and Nostromo contain multiple voices, only the characters in Woolf's novel have truly autonomous voices, for it is only Woolf's work that contains an ideological consciousness that can trasnform the novel into a spatial landscape; in this way Waves eclipses the linear historical sequences of a masculine novel such as Conrad's Nostromo. Woolf slows down the process through which the polyphonic text is organized and transfomed, leaving the crystallized structure of Nostromo in its wake, as the reader witnesses the establishment of the human personality as it passes from pre-psychical formation to a violent encounter with the limits of the self. Whereas Conrad sought to elide the fundamental problem of the modern subject, creating a work whose surface articulated itself through the use of chronotopic features, Woolf was able to exceed Conrad by developing a polyphonic novel that extirpated those superstructural elements that Conrad sought to obscure. As seen from the begative critiques of Woolf's novel, Waves was not celebrated for this achievement. It is worth noting the Pritchard and Koestler criticized Waves for exhibiting a kind of literary depravity, seeing Woolf as having interiorized her narrative consciousness for purely voyeuristic motives. This mirrors the way Bakhtin dismissed Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, denouncing those books for their "decadent degenerate psychologism."
In view of this fact one might reason that Bakhtin would recognize Waves as bearing the markings of Dostoevsky's revolutionary poetics. Woolf's work, like Dostoevsky's novels, is marked by what Bakhtin calls "the fundamental open-endedness" of the dialogue of voices in the text. Like the majority of Dostoevsky's texts, which close with the re-establishment of "a conventionally literary, conventionally monologic ending," Woolf ends Waves with a long passage from the viewpoint of Bernard. However, unlike these Dostoevskian texts, Bernard is fundamentally unable to re-create the word in terms of the univocal consciousness he once shared with his friends; Woolf's novel wishes for but is unable to supply a similarly monologic, conventional ending. I believe that both Waves and Nostromo would satisfy Bakhtin's requirement of the polyphonic novel, fore both novels are "dialogic through and through." Yet unlike Conrad, Woolf refuses to deviate from her internatlized narrational consciousness, the only exception being brief naturalistic chapters that bridge one consciousness to another. That Conrad fails to make a similar attempt enables Woolf's postmodern ideology of space to supersede Conrad's modernist appraisal of historical time. However, without Conrad as her historical precedent, Woolf would be unable to reconfigure his advancements in the literature of modern subjectivity.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 10:16 AM
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